About this Project

We were asked to create a collection of the 25+ counselors web resources into one web portal for the Syracuse VESID office. Prior to this counselors were book marking their resources or Google searching them.

At the beginning of this project the counselors were requested to fill out a survey of their resources. They were instructed to copy their resource URL's onto forms provided.

We found their lack of experience with technology as challenging as gathering their resources. This made them hesitant to contribute. After the initial prototype was demonstrated for the counselors we began to receive a great deal of feedback, it seemed at this point they wanted to be involved, and the project began to do very well. We used a metaphor that the counselors would be familiar with as the graphic, a simple yet easily recognizable file folder.

Many of the counselors still used paper copies for much of there information. This was an effective metaphor and all the counselors were pleased and the supervisors found that they seemed to be using it more than expected. During testing four counselors were given tasks of locating certain resources. There were problems in locating one resource and this was deemed to be due to labeling, this was corrected. Upon presentation of final prototype to the entire group, it was noted that other offices were now requesting similar web portals for their locality. .

Screenshots

For the main screens we used the metaphor of files to represent their groups. This simple representation was quite effective for this group.

For the individual group, we used a single file for consistency and to assist the user to realize they had entered an individual folder.